 Rawley Silver's personal history which prompted her unique art assessment tools
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Rawley
A. Silver
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 A painting of her niece with a poem by Gabriel Mistral, this is one of the illustrations from Silver's book Poets and Artists. |
Drawing Tests Created by Rawley Silver
Rawley Silver's personal history which prompted her unique art assessment tools:
Deafened accidentally in midlife, I became interested in deaf children and adults. Painting had been my vocation before the accident. Afterward, I found art even more important, and although most of my hearing returned, I visited art classes in several schools for deaf students. In one, students filled in outlines of an abstract design made by their teacher, taking turns dipping a single brush into a jar of paint. In another school, they did not model clay, just poured it into molds, then painted the objects molded.
I asked if I might volunteer in a school which had no art teacher. The request was accepted if I agreed to attend graduate school. Since art therapy did not exist in 1961, I enrolled in Teachers College, Columbia University, receiving an M.A. and Ed. D. in Fine Arts and Fine Arts Education.
Most students in my first class could neither lip-read nor speak, and I could not sign, but we communicated easily by gesturing and sketching. The sketches that prompted their most expressive responses became the stimulus drawings used in drawing assessments later on. It soon became evident that these students were far more intelligent and talented than usually expected, and that their thoughts and feelings could be tapped by drawing tasks that bypassed language deficiencies. Subsequently, the same tasks proved useful with learning disabled students and stroke patients, and eventually, children and adults with no known impairments.
Since my background also included training and experience in social work, I was accepted for registration as an art therapist when the American Art Therapy Association was formed in 1970.
Copyright Rawley Silver 1998.